Page 202 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Truth and Meaning
object which represents another object. Meaning is the representation of an object in or by another object. The sign or the representing object can have any material manifestation as long as it can fulfill the representational function: a word, a novel, a gesture, a reaction in the brain, a city, etc. On the status of the represented object nothing is made explicit by this definition. It may be material or mental, fictitious or factual, fantasized or real, natural or artificial. From this it follows that something which is a sign in one context may be an object in another and vice versa. Signs do not constitute a class of objects. A sign is a 'functional' unit.
Consequently, no object can be pointed out as a sign unless it is integrated in a concrete process, in which more than the sign itself will have to be included in order to actually produce meaning. Only here a concrete distinction and relation between sign and object is established. So, a sign in itself is a 'virtual' unit which is 'realized' in a process creating meaning. This real and coded process is called a 'semiosis.'
In a semiosis, one infers something from a phenom- enon one thus considers as a sign, concerning some- thing else, the object. Through this inference, the relation between sign and object is specified according to a code on the basis of certain presuppositions. Some of these presuppositions are derived from the notions of code and structure: there must be distinguishable elements at hand which show systematically organized features. Semiotics never starts ab nihilo, but from already existing experience, investigating how it works and how it can be reworked through semiosis. Here the inferential specification manifests itself in new signs, referring to already existing sign-object relations. The semiosis is a continuous process of sign production.
In the history of semiotics, two strategies have been followed in order to define this process. In agreement with the first one, the representational relation is con- ceived of as secondary to the sign itself. This is the
formal tradition which emphasizes the role of the for- mal properties of the sign itself. In this tradition, the main purpose is to produce an immanent analysis of the manifestations of specific sign systems, e.g., verbal texts, in an attempt to generalize the formal properties of the particular sign system to be valid for semiotic structures as such.
The second strategy, in contrast to the formal one, stresses the representational function as constitutive for the sign. This is the pragmatic tradition which focuses on the sign-object relation without paying much attention to the specificity of particular sign systems. Here the semiotic theory is a 'general' theory of signs, trying to reach an understanding of the con- crete functioning of any particular sign system.
1.3.1 The Formal Tradition
The origin of the formal tradition is, first of all, struc-
tural linguistics, especially as laid out by Ferdinand de 180
Saussure (1857-1913) in particular. Here the linguistic sign is the point of departure for the semiotic gen- eralization. The basic quality of a sign as a semiotic entity is its relative autonomy or arbitrariness vis-a- vis the object and the immanent dichotomization of the sign in expression and content. Each of the two sign components is built up by clusters of features, through the combination of which the phonetic and the semantic units respectively are coded as formal units. The identity of the units of the expression com- ponent is exclusively defined by the mutual relations between them. The specific totality of these relations is the structure of the component. The same goes for the identity of the units and for the structure of the content component. A sign is created through the relation between the two components.
According to this definition, a chess piece which is only used in order to play chess is not a sign, because there is no difference between expression and content: the content is the coded moves and the expression is the same coded moves. According to Andre Martinet (1908- ) such an element is said to have only one articulation. A linguistic sign, however, has a double articulation: in a chain of signs there is a first articu- lation to articulate them according to their content; the separate signs have a second articulation accord- ing to the specific system of expression used. In a semiotic perspective, any sign is defined, totally or partially, through a double articulation which pro- duces an asymmetry between the two levels of articu- lation. A one-to-one relation between all units of the two components, as with the chess piece, will never occur.
Following the formal tradition it is the double articulation that gives rise to representation. The chess piece, in the context referred to above, does not rep- resent anything except itself. In a genuine sign, however, the double articulation forces us to unite expression and content through a specific mental act, an inference or interpretation, by Saussure called an association. As the associative inference cannot be located exclusively in the expression or in the content, representation is a derived effect of the double articu- lation of the sign which creates an object relation. Meaning is the representational effect produced and conditioned exclusively by the immanent properties of the sign. The order of things and the structure of experience is an effect of the sign structure.
The claim of this tradition is that the s-codes and the codes of the immanent structure of the sign are generally valid irrespective of the specific system of expression used. When two components are united through a double articulation, that is a sign which may be manifested in any medium such as the visual, the gestural, or the architectonic. The analysis of such sign systems that are formally identical with verbal language is carried out using the, same methods as are applied in linguistics. Thus, the strategy for the